Re: High Art (1998)
Donnell Simon
The University of Texas at Austin High School Special Purpose District is a state-approved public school district that offers virtual high school programs and specialty services for students and partner school districts in Texas and beyond. We opened in 1999 and we're celebrating 24 years of online education! We offer award-winning courses designed by Texas-certified specialists and teachers that meet required state of Texas and College Board standards. Our students consistently achieve high expectations on state, Advanced Placement, and SAT/ACT exams. It's our goal to ensure our program provides the rigor and support students need to be successful for a bright future in college, career, or military pursuits.
The UT High School Special Purpose District (UTHSD) offers two high schools to serve Texas residents and non-Texas residents in full-time or part-time course instruction. The UT high schools provide a comprehensive catalog of online courses aligned to state standards to support full-time students to earn their high school diploma and part-time students opportunities to supplement their coursework with flexible timelines. The UT High School teachers and specialists design and deliver online course curriculum for on-level, honors, and Advanced Placement course subjects delivered in an asynchronous format. Specialty webinars and support services assist learners to achieve success. Specialty programs at UTHS include the P-TECH Early College High School for full-time Texas students, the Empower Academy for Texas adults to complete their high school diploma or high school equivalency (GED), and opportunities for students to complete dual credit coursework. To learn more about the UTHSD virtual school student programs, login to a webinar for prospective students and parents every Monday or Wednesday through September.
The UT High School Special Purpose District engages in partnerships and provides services to support school districts with curricula, assessments, and professional development. UTHSD helps school districts launch their own full-time virtual academies with UTHSD's online courses, develops K-12 credit by exams that align to Texas standards to help students recover credit or accelerate, and provides professional development to support teachers and leaders to improve their skills in topics such as blended learning, Project-Based Learning, gifted and talented strategies, and Advanced Placement Institutes. To learn more about opportunities for school district partnerships and services, contact UTHSp...@austin.utexas.edu.
The Columbine High School massacre, often simply referred to as Columbine, was a school shooting and a failed bombing that occurred on April 20, 1999, at Columbine High School in Columbine, Colorado, United States.[b] The perpetrators, twelfth-grade students Eric Harris and Dylan Klebold, murdered twelve students and one teacher. Ten of the twelve students killed were in the school library, where Harris and Klebold subsequently died by suicide. Twenty-one additional people were injured by gunshots, and gunfire was also exchanged with the police. Another three people were injured trying to escape. The Columbine massacre was the deadliest mass shooting at a K-12 school in U.S. history, until it was surpassed by the Sandy Hook Elementary School shooting in December 2012, and later the Uvalde school shooting in May 2022, and the deadliest mass shooting at a high school in U.S. history until the Parkland high school shooting in February 2018.[c] Columbine is still considered one of the most infamous massacres in the U.S. for inspiring most other school shootings and bombings, the word "Columbine" has since become a byword for modern school shootings. Columbine still remains both the deadliest mass shooting and the deadliest school shooting to occur in the U.S. state of Colorado.
Harris and Klebold, who planned for at least a year and hoped to have a large number of victims, intended for the attack to primarily be a bombing and only secondarily a shooting. But when several homemade bombs they planted in the school failed to detonate, the pair launched a shooting attack. Their motive remains inconclusive. The police were slow to enter the school and were heavily criticized for not intervening during the shooting. The incident resulted in the introduction of the immediate action rapid deployment (IARD) tactic, which is used in active-shooter situations, and an increased emphasis on school security with zero-tolerance policies. Debates and moral panic were sparked over American gun culture and gun control laws, high school cliques, subcultures (e.g. goths), outcasts, and school bullying, as well as teenage use of pharmaceutical antidepressants, the Internet, and violence in video games and movies.
Many makeshift memorials were created after the massacre, including ones employing victims Rachel Scott's car and John Tomlin's truck. Fifteen crosses for the victims and the shooters were erected on top of a hill in Clement Park. The crosses for Harris and Klebold were later removed following controversy. Planning for a permanent memorial began in June 1999, and the resulting Columbine Memorial opened to the public in September 2007.
The Harris family lived in rented accommodations for their first three years in the Littleton area. During this time, Harris attended Ken Caryl Middle School, where he met Klebold.[15] In 1996, the Harris family purchased a house south of CHS. Harris's older brother attended college at the University of Colorado Boulder.[16][17]
Klebold attended Normandy Elementary in Littleton, Colorado for first and second grade before transferring to Governor's Ranch Elementary, and became part of the CHIPS ("Challenging High Intellectual Potential Students") program.[20]
In 1996, 15-year-old Eric Harris created a private website on America Online (AOL).[e] It was initially to host levels (also known as WADs) Harris created for use in the first-person shooter video games Doom, Doom II, and Quake.[21][22][f] On the site, Harris began a blog, which included details about Harris sneaking out of the house to cause mischief and vandalism, such as lighting fireworks with Klebold and others.[24] These were known as "Rebel Missions",[25] and Harris's blog primarily consisted of "mission logs". Beginning in early 1997, the blog postings began to show the first signs of Harris's anger against society.[26] By the end of the year, the site contained instructions on how to make explosives.[27] Harris's site attracted few visitors and caused no concern until August 1997, after Harris ended a blog post detailing murderous fantasies with "All I want to do is kill and injure as many of you as I can, especially a few people. Like Brooks Brown." Brown was a classmate of his.[28][g] After Brown's parents viewed the site, they contacted the Jefferson County Sheriff's Office on August 7, 1997. An investigator wrote a draft affidavit to request a search warrant for the Harris household, but it was never submitted to a judge.[30][16][31]
On January 30, 1998, Harris and Klebold were arrested for breaking into a white van parked near Littleton and stealing tools and computer equipment.[32] They would subsequently attend a joint court hearing, where they pled guilty to the felony theft. The judge sentenced them to a juvenile diversion program.[33][34] As a result, both delinquents attended mandatory classes such as anger management and talked with diversion officers.[h] They both were eventually released from diversion several weeks early because of positive actions in the program and put on probation.[36][33]
Shortly after the court hearing for the van break-in, Harris reverted his website back to just hosting user-created levels of Doom. He began to write his thoughts down in a journal. Klebold had already been keeping a personal journal since March 1997; as early as November of that year, Klebold had mentioned going on a killing spree. Klebold used his journal to vent about his personal problems as well as what he'd wear and use during the attack.[35] In both their journals, Harris and Klebold would later plot the attack. Soon after beginning his journal, Harris typed out a plan for an attack which included possibly escaping to a foreign country after the massacre, or hijacking an aircraft at Denver International Airport and crashing it into New York City.[16]
Harris and Klebold's schoolwork also foreshadowed the massacre.[i] They both displayed themes of violence in their creative writing projects. In December 1997, Harris wrote a paper on school shootings titled "Guns in School",[42][43] and a poem from the perspective of a bullet.[44] Klebold wrote a short story about a man killing students which worried his teacher so much that she alerted his parents.[45][46]
Both had also actively researched war and murder. For one project, Harris wrote a paper on Nazi Germany and Klebold wrote a paper on Charles Manson.[47][48][49] In a psychology class, Harris wrote he dreamed of going on a shooting spree with Klebold.[50] Harris's journals described several experimental bomb detonations.[35][51]
Nearly a year before the massacre, Klebold wrote a message in Harris's 1998 yearbook: "killing enemies, blowing up stuff, killing cops!! My wrath for January's incident will be godlike. Not to mention our revenge in the commons"; "the commons" was slang for the school cafeteria.[14]
Harris and Klebold were both enrolled in video-production classes and kept five video tapes that were recorded with school video equipment.[52] Only two of these, "Hitmen for Hire" and "Rampart Range", and part of a third known as "Radioactive Clothing", have been released.[j] The remaining three tapes detailed their plans and reasons for the massacre, including the ways they hid their weapons and deceived their parents.[54] Most were shot in the Harris family basement, and are thus known as the Basement Tapes. Thirty minutes before the attack, they made a final video saying goodbye and apologizing to their friends and families.[55]
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